There are people who won't care about the many layers of Jonathan Franzen's account of his journey to Masafuera; for others it's a must-read

Jonathan Franzen's caption: The uninhabited island was named for a marooned eighteenth-century adventurer who likely inspired the first English novel. I thought I’d strand myself there and read it.

"In the South Pacific Ocean, five hundred miles off the coast of central Chile, is a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters. [The island] is officially called Alejandro Selkirk. . . In the nineteen-sixties, Chilean tourism officials renamed the island for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish adventurer whose tale of solitary living in the archipelago was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, but the locals still use its original name, Masafuera: Farther Away."

-- from the opening paragraph of Jonathan Franzen's
New Yorker "reflection" "Farther Away"

Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away" is available on The New Yorker's Facebook page "for a limited time." (Caution: You have to declare yourself a "fan" with a "like," kind of petty blackmail, it seems to me. I actually am a fan of the magazine, just not of its -- or anyone else's -- Facebook page. Still, we we click that LIKE button, we're not swearing on a stack of bibles.)

If you miss the Facebook window, subscribers can access the online digital edition, or I see on its iPad app; nonsubscribers can buy access to single issues of the digital edition. (If you're in a bind, drop me an e-mail -- at kenfromdwt@aol.com -- and I'll send you a text version as long as you don't tell. There's also additional information on the magazine's website, including a preview blogpiece that presented some of the photos Franzen took during the journey with his comments.

by Ken

Spread over Thursday night's and last night's late-night slot I presented the title story from E. B. White's 1954 anthology, The Second Tree from the Corner, a story about a man's effort to get relief from physically as well as psychologically crippling anxieties with the help of a psychiatrist, whose help really doesn't do much for him.

I don't know that any readers needed my elbow in their ribs, but I couldn't resist belaboring the obvious by recalling White's own dictum (articulated, in fact, in the Foreword to Second Tree: "Whoever sets pen to paper writes of himself, whether knowingly or not, and this is a book of revelations." And so apart from the story's value as a nice piece of fiction and as the piece the author and his publisher chose as a title for the book, I thought it was interest for White's grappling with what was clearly his own problem in finding meaning in life.

By weird coincidence, I already had in my possession, but hadn't yet read, Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away" in the current (Apr. 18) "Journeys" issue of The New Yorker. Actually, I think I had already looked at the start of the piece, and definitely planned to come back at some point to what I assumed was simply an account of the author's "getting away from it all" trip to one of the planet's more remote spots. That certainly sounded interesting, and as I said, I always planned to come back to it when time permitted, like maybe on the weekend.

I might note that I've never read any of Franzen's books, or for that matter any of those of his close friend David Foster Wallace, who turns out to figure prominently in this piece. The piece does, in fact, tell the story of the author's trip to Masafuera, and would be worth reading just for that. Just as travel reportage, it's of immediate interest for its depiction of:

*the island's remoteness.

To reach the island, which is officially called Alejandro Selkirk, you fly from Santiago in an eight-seater that makes twice-weekly flights to an island a hundred miles to the east. Then you have to travel in a small open boat from the airstrip to the archipelago’s only village, wait around for a ride on one of the launches that occasionally make the twelve-hour outward voyage, and then, often, wait further, sometimes for days, for weather conducive to landing on the rocky shore.

* its humanly impossible physical setting, which consists mostly of sheer vertical faces and steep but barely climbable vertical rises. When we think of "Robinson Crusoe's island," we think of a gentle, sunny tropical beach. Not so with Masafuera. The traveler who surmounts all the above-recorded obstacles to getting to the island finds, first, that getting onto it is an ordeal unto itself, and then requires an immediate climb to 3000 feet above sea level, the site of his planned campsite.

My only map of the island was a letter-size printout of a Google Earth image, and I saw right away that I’d optimistically misinterpreted the contour lines on it. What had looked like steep hills were cliffs, and what had looked like gentle slopes were steep hills.

To his surprise, the 3000-foot climb -- in the company of a young guide and his mule, which carries his backpack -- is accomplished in two hours. However, the weather turns out to be as forbidding as the topography -- fog and clouds and storms so severe that much of the time visibility is near zero, making solitary trekking a hair-raising experience, as he documents vividly.

But the travelogue is only the outermost layer of the piece. It's also a reconsideration of Robinson Crusoe -- of which, as noted above, Franzen carried a paperback copy to reread. It's a reconsideration that relates to the physical facts of the central portion of the novel, the part we all know, relating the shipwrecked Crusoe's quarter-century sojourn on his South Pacific island, and it relates to the author's (and his father's) fascination with solitude, and so inevitably it's also a reflection on his own life, past, present, and future, pegged to the state of mental exhaustion, or perhaps depression, that drove him to the trip following a four-month book tour.

The reflection on Robinson Crusoe, which stands at or near the invention of the form of the novel, at least in English. At first Franzen's poking around the history of the novel may seem like an academic exercise, but it turns out to be central to his own mental state, which seems to have at least somewhat a life crisis, and also to that of David Foster Wallace, for whom the act of novel-writing apparently made it possible to live as long as he did before the September 2008 suicide that, Franzen believes intentionally, caused the people who loved him the most intense torment.

And so the piece also lays out in much telling detail Franzen's relationship with Wallace, and the latter's ongoing struggle with mental illness. Since Wallace has become something of a cult hero since his death, an outcome that Franzen is quite sure he anticipated, I suspect that the particularly close perspective.

Here's a sample:

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy.

And another:

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not! And yet one of the lessons of David’s work (and, for me, of being his friend) is that the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn’t even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.

Franzen has a major problem with the "saintly" public image of his friend, which obliterate the real struggle of his life and seriously misrepresent his writing.

Adulatory public narratives of David, which take his suicide as proof that (as Don McLean sang of van Gogh) “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” require that there have been a unitary David, a beautiful and supremely gifted human being who, after quitting the antidepressant Nardil, which he’d been taking for twenty years, succumbed to major depression and was therefore not himself when he committed suicide.

For much of Wallace's writing life, Franzen tells us,

Fiction was his way off the island, and as long as it was working for him—as long as he’d been able to pour his love and passion into preparing his lonely dispatches, and as long as these dispatches were coming as urgent and fresh and honest news to the mainland—he’d achieved a measure of happiness and hope for himself.

And then came "years of struggle" with a novel in which Wallace no longer believed, and his suicide became the secret preoccupation of his final year.

Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.

Just as the fictional Trexler's life crisis was so clearly an expression of E. B. White's attempt to grapple with similar issues, for Franzen his friend's more extreme struggles connect to his own, which may be less severe but clearly don't feel minor to him. I don't suppose Trexler's consolation in that indefinable something that makes his life bearable, as exemplified by his imaginary "second tree from the corner," caught in perfect evening light, would be of much help to Franzen, whose talk of his addictions suggests that he's closer to Trexler the patient, who you'll recall answered the question of whether anything at all made him feel better suggested sometimes a drink. (Franzen writes of Robinson Crusoe that "the novel’s most astonishing detail may be that Robinson makes 'three large runlets of rum or spirits' last a quarter century; I would have drunk all three in a month, just to be done with them.)

I think the foregoing should amply warn off any potential readers of this extraordinary piece who just wouldn't give a damn, or for whom the rewards wouldn't repay the effort. Which leaves potential readers who really shouldn't miss it.

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